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The Black Earth exchange, part 1: ‘Unlike nationalists, Hitler didn’t care about his own people’

[additional-authors]
October 14, 2015

Timothy Snyder is the Housum Professor of History at Yale University and a member of the Committee on Conscience of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which received the literature award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding. Snyder is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement and a former contributing editor at The New Republic. He is a permanent fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences, serves as the faculty advisor for the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and sits on the advisory council of the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

The following exchange will focus on Professor Snyder’s critically acclaimed new book Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books, 2015).

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Dear Professor Snyder,

Your new book begins with a presentation of a surprising new reading of the worldview of Adolph Hitler. According to this reading, rather than being the quintessential hyper-nationalist fascist dictator he is usually presented as, Hitler in fact saw the state as a meaningless, even “Jewish”, abstraction. As you write:

Any nonracist attitude was Jewish, thought Hitler, and any universal idea a mechanism of Jewish dominion… Any abstract idea of the state was also Jewish. “There is no such thing,” wrote Hitler, “as the state as an end in itself.” As he clarified, “the highest goal of human beings” was not “the preservation of any given state or government, but the preservation of their kind.” The frontiers of existing states would be washed away by the forces of nature in the course of racial struggle: “One must not be diverted from the borders of Eternal Right by the existence of political borders.

In the convincing case you present for treating Hitler as a thinker with mainly planetary, rather than nationalistic, aspirations raises some serious questions about lessons of the Holocaust. If Hitler is not the nationalist many of us think he was, how does that change our the type of warning the story of Nazism offers us?

Yours,

Shmuel.

***

Dear Shmuel,

You have hit upon a crucial point. Rather than challenging any of our everyday understandings in particular, I try to start from the beginning, with what Hitler himself said; and then move forward to the question of how such radical views could possibly have been realized in practice. I can’t summarize here the entire argument about how practice confirms theory, but before I say more about theory I think it’s useful to note that, in addition to the kinds of citations you provide, there is abundant empirical evidence that realizing such a world was in fact a precondition for implementing a Holocaust. For example: the entire Holocaust took place in a zone where the Germans did destroy or aspire to destroy a state; the Holocaust began in zone where Nazi state destruction encountered Soviet state destruction; Jews who lived before the war in that stateless zone had roughly a one in twenty chance of surviving the war, and Jews who lived elsewhere had roughly a one in two chance of surviving; the places that were most dangerous for Jews outside of the stateless zones were places where borders were moved or where regimes changed (as in the new states of Slovakia and Croatia); places which were not regarded as antisemitic but where sovereignty was seriously compromised, such as the Netherlands and Greece, had a relatively high death rate, higher than sovereign countries such as Romania and Hungary and, for that matter, Nazi Germany.

What does all that mean? It means that even if we did not know that Hitler was a zoological anarchist, we would have good reason to rethink our understanding of the Holocaust and inquire about the mechanisms and processes associated with the compromise and destruction of states. The fact that we do have his own words makes it all the more important that we reconsider the kind of view that you characterize. Hitler was not simply a nationalist who happened to be a very extreme nationalist. He said himself that he meant to use German nationalism as a political force that would throw Germans into a racial war. Unlike nationalists he was not concerned about his own people, at home or abroad; and he was not concerned very much with the state and its boundaries. A nationalist wants a state that is, more or less, like the states that other nations have: he may want more territory or more people, but he does not deny that other nations and states exist and in some way should exist. Hitler was not interested in a state like other states. Instead he used the German state to incubate racial organizations, such as the SS, that were then used to destroy other states, thus beginning a new kind of murderous politics. The point of the SS was not that they were extreme German nationalists; the point was that they were the people meant tounleash what Hitler saw as natural racial conflict.

None of this means that nationalism is a good thing. But what it does mean is that we should be alert to the difference between a leader whose basic interests concern the nation and the state, and a leader whose basic desire is to create the conditions for ceaseless racial war. One of those conditions was the eradication of political order as it was then understood.  The most important, for Hitler, was the eradication of the Jews, since he held them responsible for all political (and other) ideas that prevented racial conflict.

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